The North American power grid was once called the ‘supreme engineering achievement of the 20th century.’ Unfortunately, the power grid is quickly aging such that outages and inefficiencies result in great costs to end users. In addition, terror activities and malicious computer code threaten denial of service to the nation's critical infrastructure.
A growing movement to provide clean energy, utilizing such sources as wind, currently suffers from significant inefficiencies due to limitation within the power grid. Commercial wind farms often produce much greater energy than is realized because the transmissions lines cannot accommodate the amount of energy produced, thereby resulting in large amounts of wasted effort.
Residential applications are often seen as impractical due to costs, lack of providing enough energy during peak demand, and wasted energy during off-peak times. In addition, there is no application that provides two-way communication between consumers and the distribution source.
Current efforts to develop a smart grid are ongoing. A smart grid may be an electrical grid that uses information and communications technology to gather and act on information, such as information about the behaviors of suppliers and consumers, in an automated fashion to improve the efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of the production and distribution of electricity.
The developments in the smart grid do not include providing the end user the ability to utilize and manage distributed energy sources. Further, there is no system that currently provides the capability of the distributed energy sources, such as in residential application, to return unused energy to the power grid, or store excess energy for later use by the consumer. Although smart meters allow electric utility companies to collect data at the consumer site, there is not a system that provides the consumer, or other interested stakeholders, the ability to collect usage and generation data, to deliver electricity more efficiently and detect problems within the system, and provide information that allows for strategic placement of distributed generation sources for overall performance improvement.
There exists a need to integrate electric power generation and electric storage techniques into a single delivery system. There also exists a need to connect with a meter to create a home electric power source with an ability to provide a two-way communication between consumers and the distribution source.